Saturday, February 28, 2009

Unbelievable. “Fast Eddie” only pleaded guilty to a $1.5 million university rip-off scheme so he could get in front of Judge Milton Shadur instead of a jury. Shadur then cut him loose with no jail time. (CBS2) (Mark Brown)

Friday, February 27, 2009

Readers have often asked me how companies could ever expect to make money running a charter school? Eva Moskowitz might answer--"it's easy." The former N.Y. City Council member, and possible mayoral candidate, who founded and runs the four Harlem Success Academy charter schools, is making "a bundle," writes Daily Newscolumnist Juan Gonzalez:

The nonprofit organizations connected to the schools have yet to file more recent tax returns, but Moskowitz said in an interview late Thursday she received $310,000 last year - the 2007-2008 year - $250,000 in salary and $60,000 in a bonus.

If you're counting, that means Moskowitz, who is responsible for four schools, makes more than Chancellor Klein, who gets $250,000 to run 1,400 schools. Now she says, she wants to operate 40 schools. It's impossible to know how Moskowitz' schools are performing since the DOE hasn't ever posted any independent test results. Moskowitz says her schools are going great but complains that they're "underfunded."

A reader's comment forced me to go back and re-read Deb Meier's review of Barack Obama's speech and I'm afraid I misrepresented Deb's critique. While it's true that she was highly critical of the education part of Obama's speech, which is certainly understandable, I made it seem like she "found nothing to support" in the entire speech. Knowing Deb as I do, and knowing that she is now and has been a strong and consistent, while at times critical Obama supporter, I'm sure there was plenty in the rest of the speech that she might have applauded. But that's not what she was writing about. That should have been obvious. My apologies to my friend (still, I hope), colleague and teacher Deb Meier.

While I share some of the same criticisms of Obama’s speech and of his developing program, I think Deb attributes muchmore to him than he deserves and puts some words in his mouth in order to knock them down. For example, Deb accuses Obama of "confusing tests with being well-educated." Of course, he never said anything like that.

Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong. (Applause.)

And don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test. (Cheers, applause.) I don't want teachers to the -- teaching to the test. I don't want them uninspired and I don't want our students uninspired. (Applause.) So what I've said is we will measure and hold accountable performance, but let's help our teachers and our principals develop a curriculum and assessments that teach our kids to become not just good test-takers. We need assessments that can improve achievement by including the kinds of research and scientific investigation and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st century knowledge economy. And we have to make sure that subjects like art and music are not being crowded out of the curriculum. And that's what we will do when I'm president of the United States. (Cheers, applause.)

Not so. The gasoline-powered car was actually invented by Al GoreKarl Benz (as in Mercedes), who obviously didn’t realize what a jam he was sticking us in, back in 1878. His invention did help pull Germany out of its post-WWI depression and was central to Hitler’s re-industrialization plans. Henry Ford, an admirer of Hitler's created assembly-line production. Some say, the beginning of the end for capitalism.

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Educator, writer, school/community activist.
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Contact: smallschoolsworkshop@yahoo.com